IEEE ICC 2017 Mobile and Wireless Networking
Cooperative Caching for Spectrum Access in
Cognitive Radio Networks
Bo Zhou, Sangtian Wang, Erkai Chen, and Meixia Tao
Dept. of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
Emails: {b.zhou, wst941211, cek1006, mxtao}@sjtu.edu.cn
Abstract—In this paper, we investigate cooperative caching
for spectrum access in cognitive radio networks. By cooperative
caching, we mean that the unlicensed secondary base station
(SBS) can cache certain primary contents to serve primary
users, in exchange for the opportunities to access the licensed
spectrum. We consider the joint optimization of caching and
scheduling of the SBS to maximize the weighted average number
of satisfied secondary requests under the average available time
constraint and the cache capacity constraint. This problem is
a mixed-integer bilinear programming, which is challenging in
general. By exploring the special structure of the problem, we
first show that the optimal caching satisfies a cache-split structure
and the optimal scheduling satisfies a rate-ratio structure. Then,
based on these optimality properties, we transform the original
problem into a simplified joint cache splitting and SU partitioning
optimization problem, and propose an efficient algorithm to solve
it optimally. Moreover, we investigate the impacts of the primary
and secondary content popularity distributions on the system
performance. Numerical results verify the theoretical analysis
and provide some counter-intuitive insights.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Propelled by the vast proliferation of smart mobile devices,
global mobile data traffic is undergoing an unprecedented
growth, which is predicted to exceed 30 exabytes per month
by 2020, an eightfold increase over 2015 [1]. Meanwhile,
the demand for wireless services has also been experienc-
ing a fundamental shift, from the conventional connection-
centric communications, e.g., phone calls and messaging,
to the emerging content-centric communications, e.g., video
streaming and multimedia content sharing. To handle the “data
tsunami” with the scarce radio spectrum resources, it is of
great importance for mobile operators to take account of this
demand shift.
Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) offer a promising paradig-
m to improve spectrum efficiency and alleviate spectrum
scarcity, by allowing unlicensed secondary networks to oppor-
tunistically access the spectrum licensed to primary networks
[2]. To further provide benefits for both primary and secondary
networks, cooperative spectrum sharing has been proposed and
extensively investigated from various perspectives [3]–[5]. The
basic idea of cooperative spectrum sharing is that secondary
networks offload data traffic of primary networks in exchange
for additional spectrum access opportunities. Through this
approach, mutual benefits can be gained in CRNs.
This work is supported by the NSF of China under grants 61571299 and
61329101.
978-1-4673-8999-0/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Caching popular contents at base stations (BSs) has also
been recognized as an effective way to support the tremendous
growth of mobile data traffic [6], [7]. This is mainly due to a
central feature of content-centric services, i.e., a few popular
contents account for a majority of data traffic. Moreover, by
proactively fetching contents during off-peak times, caching
brings contents closer to users and hence can improve user-
perceived experience. As such, caching effectiveness has been
explored in different wireless architectures [8]–[10].
In light of the benefits of cooperative spectrum sharing and
caching, we would like to investigate cooperative caching in
CRNs in this work. Consider a CRN consisting of a primary
BS (PBS) and a secondary BS (SBS), and primary users (PUs)
request for primary contents and secondary users (SUs) request
for secondary contents. The SBS has a local cache with finite
storage size. By cooperative caching, we mean that the SBS
can cache certain primary contents to serve the corresponding
requests from PUs with possibly higher transmission rates.
In this way, the total time for satisfying primary requests
could be shorten and the SBS can obtain more transmission
opportunities to serve SUs with the cached secondary contents.
While cooperative caching appears to offer obvious benefits
to the CRN, it is not clear that how many primary contents
should the SBS cache. Caching too many primary contents
would provide plenty of transmission opportunities for the
SBS, which, however, may not be fully utilized, as very few
secondary contents can be cached. Moreover, the design of
cooperative caching in CRNs is further challenging due to
the heterogeneous nature of content popularities and users’
channel conditions.
Recently, caching has been investigated in CRNs in the
literature [11]–[14]. Specifically, [11] and [12] consider con-
tent caching in multi-hop CRNs to minimize the caching
dissemination and access costs and to maximize the data
retrieval probability, respectively. In [13], the authors study
dynamic spectrum allocation for proactive caching to improve
the performance of video distribution in information-centric
CRNs. However, the cooperation between primary and sec-
ondary networks are not considered in [11]–[13]. In [14], the
authors consider cooperative caching in CRNs, and propose
joint caching and scheduling algorithms to stabilize CRNs
(i.e., keep the length of all request queues for primary and
secondary contents upper-bounded). Note that, the stability
of CRNs does not necessarily lead to good performance for
 IEEE ICC 2017 Mobile and Wireless Networking
secondary networks. In addition, different users are assumed
to have same channel conditions in [14]. Therefore, it remains
unclear how to design cooperative caching in CRNs to improve
the performance of secondary networks, when users have
heterogeneous channel conditions.
In this paper, we tackle some of the above challenges. We
consider the joint optimization of caching and scheduling of
the SBS to maximize the weighted average number of satisfied
secondary requests under the average available time constraint
and the cache capacity constraint. This optimization problem
is a mixed-integer bilinear programming problem, which is
difficult to solve in general. We first characterize the structural
properties of the optimal solution. In specific, we show that the
optimal caching satisfies a cache-split structure and the optimal
scheduling satisfies a rate-ratio structure. Then, based on these
properties, we transform the original optimization problem
into a simplified joint cache splitting and SU partitioning
optimization problem, and propose an efficient and optimal
algorithm to solve it. We also study the impacts of the primary
content popularity distribution on the system performance.
Finally, numerical results verify the theoretical analysis and
provide some counter-intuitive insights. In specific, we observe
that the optimal cache splitting does not admit any monotonic
properties with the steepness of the popularity distributions of
the primary and secondary contents.
II. N ETWORK M ODEL AND P ROBLEM F ORMULATION
Consider a CRN including a licensed primary network and
an unlicensed secondary network, as illustrated in Fig. 1. The
primary network consists of one PBS and I PUs, and the
secondary network consists of one SBS and J SUs. Let I 
{1, 2, · · · , I} and J  {1, 2, · · · , J} denote the sets of PUs
and SUs, respectively. The licensed spectrum owned by the
primary network can be shared to the secondary network, when
the PBS is not serving PUs.
A. User Request and Caching Models
We consider that the primary and the secondary networks
are different, and hence the PUs and the SUs are interested
in different sets of contents. Let M  {1, 2, · · · , M } and
N  {1, 2, · · · , N } denote the sets of primary and secondary
contents, respectively. For simplicity, we assume that each
P
primary and secondary content is of the same size.1 Let qm
S
and qn denote the popularities of primary contentm ∈ M and
P
secondary
 content n ∈ N , respectively, where m∈M qm = can serve PUs who request the cached primary contents, and
S
1 and n∈N q n = 1. It is assumed that the popularity
distributions, i.e., qP  (qm P
)m∈M and qS  (qnS )n∈N ,
are known a priori. Without loss of generality, we assume
that both the primary and secondary content popularities are
decreasing in the index, i.e., q1P ≥ q2P ≥ · · · ≥ qM P
and
S S S
q1 ≥ q2 ≥ · · · ≥ qN . We consider a slotted system,
where the slot duration is comparable to the timescale of
user request dynamics, and hence can be in the order of
several minutes. Denote the slot duration as T seconds. In each
1 This assumption can be easily removed, since contents with different sizes
can be divided into equal-size content chunks.
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Fig. 1: Cooperative caching in a CRN. For example, the SBS
caches certain primary contents to serve PU 1, in exchange
for the spectrum access opportunities to serve SU 1 and SU2.
slot, PUs submit independent requests for primary contents
according to qP and SUs submit independent requests for
secondary contents, according to qS . We assume that the
request generation processes for the primary and secondary
contents are stationary with constant rates λP contents/slot and
λS contents/slot, respectively. We suppose that the PBS stores
all the primary contents. The SBS is equipped with a cache,
which can store at most C contents. We consider that the SBS
can also store some primary contents to serve primary requests
(with possibly higher transmission rates than the PBS). In this
way, the SBS may earn more transmission time to access the
licensed spectrum for serving secondary requests, as the total
time for serving primary requests can possibly be shortened.
This is refereed to as cooperative caching. For each primary
content m ∈ M, let cP m ∈ {0, 1} denote its caching status at
the SBS, where cP m = 1 indicates that primary content m is
cached and cP m = 0 otherwise. Similarly, for each secondary
content n ∈ N , let cSn ∈ {0, 1} denote its caching status at
the SBS. Let c  (cP , cS ) denote the caching strategy of the
SBS, where cP  (cP S S
m )m∈M and c  (cn )n∈N .
B. Service Model
We assume that the duration of a content transmission is
long enough to average the small-scale channel fading process.
The PBS and the SBS transmit at fixed power. We denote
the transmission rate provided by the PBS to PU i as RP,i
contents/second and the transmission rate provided by the SBS
to SU j as RS,j contents/second. We assume that the SBS
denote the transmission rate from the SBS to PU i as RS,i
content/second. Note that we do not necessarily have RS,i >
RP,i for all PU i. All primary requests must be served, by
either the PBS or the SBS, while the secondary requests may
only be partially served by the SBS due to the unlicensed
nature of the secondary network and the limited cache size
of the SBS. Let ρP i,m ∈ [0, 1] denote the fraction of content
request from PU i to primary content m that is served by
the SBS. The remaining fraction of such content requests will
be served by the PBS. Similarly, let ρSj,n ∈ [0, 1] denote the
fraction of content requests from SU j to secondary content
 IEEE ICC 2017 Mobile and Wireless Networking

n that is served by the SBS. Let ρ  (ρP , ρS ) denote the Lemma 1: There exists CS∗ ∈ {1, · · · , C} such that the
P P
scheduling strategy of the SBS, where ρ  (ρi,m )i∈I,m∈M optimal caching strategy of the SBS c∗ satisfies a cache-split
and ρS  (ρSj,n )j∈J ,n∈N . Note that, the SBS can only serve structure, i.e.,

the requests for the cached (primary and secondary) contents. P∗ 1 if m = 1, · · · , C − CS∗
Therefore, under caching strategy c and scheduling strategy c m = , (2)
0 otherwise
ρ, the average time for serving the primary requests and the 
1 if n = 1, · · · , CS∗
secondary requests in each slot are respectively given by cS∗
n = . (3)
  0 otherwise
  ρP
i,m cm
P
(1 − ρP P
i,m )cm 1 − cP CS∗ is referred to as the optimal cache splitting threshold.
m
TP = λP q m
P
+ + ,
RS,i RP,i RP,i Lemma 1 suggests that the cache space at the SBS can be
i∈I m∈M
splitted into two sub-caches, where the sub-cache with sizes
  ρS cS ∗
S
T = S S j,n n
λ qn . C −C S is for primary contents and the sub-cache with size CS∗
RS,j is for secondary contents, and the optimal caching strategy is
j∈J n∈N
to cache the most popular contents according the size of each
C. Problem Formulation sub-cache. Therefore, the optimal caching strategy c∗ can be
In this work, our goal is to jointly optimize the caching found by a one-dimensional search of the single variable CS .
and scheduling strategies of the SBS so as to maximize the For any given cache splitting threshold CS , Problem 1
utility of the SBS, which is defined as the weighted average reduces to a linear programming problem with respect to the
number of satisfied secondary requests. Mathematically, the scheduling strategy, the optimal solution of which is denoted as
optimization problem is formulated as: ρ∗ (CS ). While this linear program can be solved by standard
Problem 1 (Optimal Caching and Scheduling): algorithms (e.g., the simplex algorithm or the interior-point
  method), we show that ρ∗ (CS ) satisfies a rate-ratio structure in
S S S S
max U (c, ρ) = wj λ qn ρj,n cn (1a)
c,ρ the following lemma, which can provide insights for designing
j∈J n∈N
simple efficient algorithms.
s.t. T S ≤ T − T P , (1b) Lemma 2: There exists a vector μ  (μCS )CS ∈{1,··· ,C}
 
cPm + c S
n ≤ C, (1c) such that for each CS , the optimal scheduling strategy ρ∗ (CS )
m∈M n∈N satisfies a rate-ratio structure, i.e.,
P S

ρi,m ∈ [0, 1], ρj,n ∈ [0, 1], ∀i, j, m, n, (1d) P∗ 1 if RS,i > RP,i & m = 1, · · · , C − CS
P S ρi,m (CS ) = ,
cm ∈ {0, 1}, cn ∈ {0, 1}, ∀m, n, (1e) 0 otherwise
where wj is the weight that represents the priority for SU (4)
j. Constraint (1b) indicates that the average time for serv- ⎧
⎪
⎨1 if wj RS,j > μCS & n = 1, · · · , CS
ing the secondary requests T S can not exceed the average
available time for the SBS, i.e., the slot duration T minus ρS∗
j,n (C S ) = Sj,n if wj RS,j = μCS & n = 1, · · · , CS ,
⎪
⎩
the average time for serving the primary requests T P . We 0 otherwise
refer to constraint (1b) as the average available time constraint. (5)
Constraint (1c) is the cache capacity constraint of the SBS. Let
where {Sj,n } can be any feasible {ρSj,n (CS )} such that
U ∗ denote the optimal value to Problem 1.
T S (ρS∗ (CS )) achieves the largest value among all feasible
Problem 1 is a mixed-integer bilinear programming prob-
ρS (CS ), i.e.,
lem, where each bilinear term involves the product of a binary
variable (i.e., c) and a continuous variable (i.e., ρ) [15], and T −T P (ρP ∗ (CS )) ≥ T S (ρS∗ (CS )) ≥ T S (ρS (CS )), ∀ρS (CS ).
hence is difficult to solve in general. Lemma 2 indicates that for each cached primary content,
III. O PTIMAL C ACHING AND S CHEDULING S TRATEGY the request from PU i will be exclusively served by the SBS,
provided that PU i can receive a higher transmission rate from
In this section, we first characterize the structural properties
the SBS than the PBS, as seen in (4). The reason is that for the
of the optimal caching and scheduling strategies. Then, based
SBS, serving PUs who can receive higher transmission rates
on these optimality properties, we transform the original prob-
from the PBS than the SBS (i.e., RP,i ≥ RS,i ) is not conducive
lem (Problem 1) into a simplified problem (Problem 2), and
to earn extra transmission time to serve SUs. Moreover, from
propose an efficient and optimal algorithm to solve it. Finally,
(5), it can be seen that for each cached secondary content,
we study the impacts of the primary content popularity on the
if the weighed transmission rate of SU j (i.e., wj RS,j ) is
system performance, when qP follows Zipf distributions [16].
larger than a certain threshold μCS , then the SBS will serve
A. Optimality Properties the corresponding request completely; if wj RS,j equals to
First, we show that the optimal caching strategy satisfies the this threshold, then the SBS will serve the request (possibly
following cache-split structure.2 partially) with the remaining available transmission time. This
reveals that the SBS will fully exploit the limited cache size
2 All the proofs are omitted due to page limit. and the limited available transmission time.
 IEEE ICC 2017 Mobile and Wireless Networking

B. Equivalent Problem ΔU (Jˆk , CS )  U (Jˆk , CS ) − U (Jˆk , CS − 1). (10)

Lemma 1 and Lemma 2 can be exploited to design efficient Then, we have the following proposition.
algorithms for obtaining the optimal caching and scheduling Proposition 1: For any given Jˆk , we have
strategy to Problem 1. We start with several definitions. We 
sort wj RS,j for all SUs j ∈ J in the descending order and ΔU (Jˆk , CS ) = qC
S
S
λS wj , (11)
denote rank(j) as the ranking of SU j. Define Jˆk  {j ∈ j∈Jˆk ∪ΔJˆk
J |rank(j) ≤ k} for k = 1, · · · , J and set Jˆ0 = ∅. Define
ΔJˆk  Jˆk+1 \ Jˆk . Note that Jˆ0 ⊆ Jˆ1 ⊆ · · · ⊆ JˆJ = J . We for each CS ∈ {2, · · · , CSmin (Jˆk )} and
refer to Jˆk as an SU partitioning. Define Jˆ  (Jˆk )k=0,1,··· ,J  wj † RS,j †
as the set of all possible SU partitionings. ΔU (Jˆk , CS ) = qCS
λS (wj − )
S
RS,j
We can see that, for any CS , there always exists Jˆk∗ ∈ Jˆ j∈Jkˆ

such that wj RS,j ≥ μCS for all j ∈ Jˆk∗ ∪ΔJˆk∗ and wj RS,j <  1 1

P P
− qC−CS +1 λ wj † RS,j † − , (12)
μCS for all other j, where μCS is given in (5). By Lemma 2, RP,i RS,i
we have the following relation between ρS and Jˆk∗ : i∈ÎS
⎧
⎪ if j ∈ Jˆk∗ & n = 1, · · · , CS for each CS ∈ {CSmin + 2, · · · , CSmax (Jˆk )}, where j † ∈ ΔJˆk .
⎨1
Based on Proposition 1, we have the following lemma.
ρj,n (CS ) = Sj,n if j ∈ ΔJˆk∗ & n = 1, · · · , CS . (6)
S∗
⎪
⎩ Lemma 3: For any given Jˆk , ΔU (Jˆk , CS ) is positive for
0 otherwise all CS ∈ {2, · · · , CSmin (Jˆk )} and is decreasing with CS for
min max ˆ
Note that, by Lemma 2, {Sj,n } can be explicitly determined all CS ∈ {CS + 2, · · · , CS (∗Jk )}.
Lemma 3 indicates that CS (Jˆk ) ∈ {CSmin (Jˆk ), · · · ,
by CS and Jˆk∗ . Therefore, we only need to focus on finding
CS (Jk )}. Moreover, for given Jˆk , to maximize the utility,
max ˆ
a proper Jˆk instead of determining μ in Lemma 2. Now,
the SBS may not choose to cache as many secondary con-
we can equivalently transform Problem 1 into the following
tents as possible, i.e., CS∗ (Jˆk ) does not necessarily equal to
optimization problem.
CSmax (Jˆk ). The reason is that, when CS increases, to maintain
Problem 2 (Optimal Cache Splitting and SU Partitioning):
⎛ ⎞ the feasibility of the available time constraint, the SBS may
C
 S   need to serve fewer requests from users in ΔJˆk∗ , which may
max U (Jˆk , CS ) = λS qnS ⎝ wj + wj Sj,n ⎠ lead to the decrease of the utility of the SBS. This reveals the
Jˆk ,CS n=1 j∈Jˆk j∈ΔJˆk tradeoff between serving more requests from users Jˆk∗ and
⎛ ⎞
CS serving more requests from users in ΔJˆk∗ , for given Jˆk∗ .
  1  Sj,n
s.t. λS qnS ⎝ + ⎠ (7a) Note that, CSmin (Jˆk ) = CSmax (Jˆk+1 ). Thus, we have the
n=1 j∈Jˆk
RS,j
j∈ΔJˆk
RS,j following property of CS∗ (Jˆk ).
Proposition 2: CS∗ (Jˆk1 ) ≥ CS∗ (Jˆk2 ) for all k1 < k2 .
 1 C−C
S  1 1

≤ T − λP + λP q m
P
− , Proposition 2 indicates that, to serve more SUs (recalling
i∈I
RP,i m=1
R P,i R S,i that Jˆk1 ⊆ Jˆk2 ), the SBS should cache more primary contents
i∈ÎS
so that it could obtain more available transmission time.
CS ∈ {1, · · · , C}, (7b)
Now, we can develop an efficient algorithm to solve Prob-
ˆ ˆ
Jk ∈ J , (7c) lem 2 optimally, as summarized in Algorithm 1.

where ÎS  {i ∈ I|RS,i > RP,i } denotes the PUs whose
requests for the cached primary contents can always be served
by the SBS.
For given SU partitioning Jˆk , we can see that Problem 2
reduces to a cache splitting sub-problem, which is an integer
programming problem. To efficiently solve each sub-problem,
we first characterize some properties of CS∗ (Jˆk ).
For each sub-problem, it can be seen that CS∗ (Jˆk ) ∈
{1, · · · , CSmax (Jˆk )}, where
CSmax (Jˆk )  max{CS ∈ {1, · · · , C}|Sj,n = 0 ∀j ∈ ΔJˆk
and Constraint (7a) is satisfied}.
To further simplify the search for CS∗ (Jˆk ), we study how
U (Jˆk , CS ) varies with CS for given Jˆk . First, define
CSmin (Jˆk )  max{CS ∈ {1, · · · , C}|Sj,n = 1 ∀j ∈ ΔJˆk
and Constraint (7a) is satisfied},
C. Impacts of Content Popularities
Consider that the popularities of the primary and sec-
ondary contents qP and qS follow Zipf distributions, i.e.,
−α
n−β
qmP
= m M
S
−α and qn =
N −β , where α and β are
l=1 l l=1 l
the Zipf parameters, which determine the skewness of the
corresponding distribution. Note that, the Zipf-like distribution
is commonly used to model the popularity of online contents,
such as web pages and videos [16].
Theorem 1: U ∗ is non-decreasing with α.
From Theorem 1, we can see that, when the popularity
(8) distribution of primary contents gets steeper (i.e., α increases),
the SBS can achieve a higher utility, as caching primary
contents becomes more effective. In other words, caching
effectiveness improves with the skewness of the popularity
distribution of primary contents. This phenomenon can also be
observed for the popularity distribution of secondary contents,
(9) which will be shown in Section IV.
 IEEE ICC 2017 Mobile and Wireless Networking

Algorithm 1 Algorithm for Problem 2 TABLE I: Simulation parameters

1: Set CSmax (Jˆ0 ) = C. BS Tx Power 46 dBm BS-User Ant. Gain 14 dBi
Bandwidth 1 MHz Noise Power -104 dBm
2: for k = 0 : 1 : J do Lognormal Shadowing 8 dBm Small-scale Fading Rayleigh
3: Compute CSmin (Jˆk ) by (9). BS pathloss =128.1 + 37.6log10 (d/1000) dB, d > 35 m
4: CSmax (Jˆk ) ← CSmin (Jˆk−1 ).
5: if ΔU (Jˆk , CSmin (Jˆk ) + 2) < 0 then
6: CS† ← CSmin (Jˆk ) + 1.
7: else if ΔU (Jˆk , CSmax (Jˆk )) > 0 then
8: CS† ← CSmax (Jˆk ).
9: else
10: Find CS† such that ΔU (Jˆk , CS† − 1) > 0 and
ΔU (Jˆk , CS† ) < 0, through finding the zero-crossing point
of ΔU (Jˆk , CS ) by a bisection search based on (12).
11: end if
12: CS∗ (Jˆk ) ← arg maxCS ∈{C † ,C min (Jˆk )} U (Jˆk , CS )
S S
13: end for
14: k ∗ ← arg maxk∈{0,1,··· ,J} U (Jˆk , CS∗ (Jˆk )).
15: Obtain the optimal cache splitting and SU partitioning
strategy (CS (Jˆk∗ ), Jˆk∗ ).

IV. N UMERICAL R ESULTS

In this section, we provide numerical examples to verify the
analytical results and offer some design insights. We consider
a CRN consisting of one PBS, I = 50 PUs, one SBS, and J =
50 SUs. The coverage regions of the PBS and the SBS have the
same radius of 600 m and the distance between the PBS and
the SBS is set to 200 m. We randomly distribute PUs and SUs
in the coverage regions of the PBS and the SBS, respectively,
with the exception that no PUs are distributed within 35 m
from the PBS and the SBS, and no SUs are within 35 m from
the SBS. There are M = 200 primary contents and N = 200
secondary contents, where each content is of size D = 10
Mbytes. The content popularities are assumed to follow Zipf
distributions. We set the Zipf parameters α = β = 0.8 unless
stated otherwise. The SBS can cache up to C = 60 contents.
We set T = 300 seconds, and λP = λS = 1 content/slot. We
choose wj randomly from the set [0, 1] for each SU j.
The system parameters and propagation models are the same
for the PBS and the SBS, and are given in Table I. For given
users’ locations, we can determine the SNR of PU i from the
PBS SNRP,i , the SNR of PU i from the SBS SNRS,i , and
the SNR of SU j from the SBS SNRS,i . Thus, we obtain
the transmission rates (in contents/second) for each PU i and
B
SU j using Shannon’s formula, given by RP,i = D log2 (1 +
B B
SNRP,i ), RS,i = D log2 (1+SNRS,i ), and RS,j = D log2 (1+
SNRS,j ), where B is the bandwidth.
First, we compute the utilities of the SBS U (Jˆk , CS ) for
different SU partitionings Jˆk and cache splitting thresholds CS
in Fig. 2. We set the utility to zero if (Jˆk , CS ) does not satisfy
the average available time constraint in (7a). From Fig. 2,
we can see that the action space of (Jˆk , CS ) is divided into
two regions by a boundary {CSmax (Jˆk )} and the boundary
is decreasing with k. This validates Proposition 2. Fig. 3
illustrates U (Jˆk , CS ) versus CS for given Jˆk . It can be seen
Fig. 2: U (Jˆk , CS ) versus Jˆk and CS .
that the behaviour of U (Jˆk , CS ) matches the properties of
ΔU (Jˆk , CS ) in Lemma 3. We would like to emphasize that
this is the key idea behind Algorithm 1.
Then, we study the impacts of the Zipf parameters α and
β on the optimal utility of the SBS and the cache splitting
threshold. Fig. 4 illustrates the optimal utility of SBS U ∗
versus α and β. We can see that U ∗ is non-decreasing with
α, which verifies Theorem 1. We also observe that U ∗ is
increasing with β. This reflects that caching effectiveness
improves as the popularity distributions of the primary and
second contents get steeper.
Fig. 5 illustrates the optimal cache splitting threshold CS∗
versus α and β. Intuitively, when α increases (or β decreases),
the SBS may only need to cache fewer primary contents (i.e.
more secondary contents) to maximize its utility. Thus, we
expect that CS∗ should also be non-decreasing with α and non-
increasing with β. However, in Fig. 5, we observe that CS∗ does
not admit any monotonic properties with the Zipf parameters.
The intuitive reason is that, when α increases (or β decreases),
to maximize the utility, the SBS may choose to cache fewer
secondary contents and select a larger SU partitioning, instead
of cache fewer primary contents.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we study cooperative caching for dynamic
access in CRNs. We formulate the joint optimization of
caching and scheduling of the SBS to maximize the utility
of the SBS. We show that the optimal caching and the
 IEEE ICC 2017 Mobile and Wireless Networking

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10



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  56 57


  20
0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 0 0.5 1 1.5 2

 
Fig. 3: U (Jˆk , CS ) versus CS for given Jˆk . Fig. 5: CS∗ versus α and β.

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Fig. 4: U ∗ versus α and β.
optimal scheduling possess a cache-split structure and a rate-
ratio structure, respectively. Based on these properties, we
simplify the original problem into a joint cache splitting and
SU partitioning optimization problem, and propose an efficient
algorithm to obtain the optimal solution. We further study the
impacts of the primary content popularity distribution on the
system performance. Numerical results validate the theoretical
analysis and offer some counter-intuitive insights.
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